In a conference room, as Culler and another Endeavour colleague, assistant
professor Anthony Joseph, look on, Katz resorts to colored markers and
a whiteboard, mapping out a sprawling diagram of boxes connected to boxes
- the eight "expeditions," some with roots going back to the late '70s,
that have been harnessed together to form Endeavour.

There's Iceberg, Ninja, Telegraph, OceanicStore, Digital Library, Millennium
- "a supersaturated soup of activities," Culler calls it, that encompasses
a future fecund with information. For years, members of these various projects
have been exploring how to blend cell phones seamlessly with the Internet
or how to design fluid, intelligent databases that can be updated continuously
and made available everywhere. Now they are studying how to tie together
devices ranging in size and complexity from centralized supercomputers
to cubic-millimeter specks of "smart dust" that, like slime molds,
self-organize into amorphous, calculating swarms.

Whether it's voice recognition, computer vision, nanotechnology, or adaptable
hardware that reconfigures itself on demand, somewhere at Berkeley a team
is exploring it. And Endeavour plans to combine the results into a blueprint
for a world where computation never ceases and computers are embedded in
everything. Think of Endeavour as a network connecting all these efforts,
focusing their intellectual energy.

"Walk in here a year from now," says Culler, "and you should get a sense
of what the information technology of the next century is going to feel
like. You'll see lots of spaces where people are doing computer research,
but you won't see any computers." From there, it will be a small step to
the day when a professor can walk into a seminar room, pull out a souped-up
version of a PalmPilot, and watch it instantly transform into a control
panel - with virtual buttons to seize control of the lights, the sound
system, the digital projector, the cameras that are feeding the talk to
the Web.

From the testbed they're now building at Soda Hall, the researchers hope
to colonize the university, department by department, then extend the
experimental
system to the city beyond. Whether sitting in a café on Telegraph
Avenue or out on the campus lawn, you'd be as connected as someone rooted
to a SPARCstation. And if the system works in Berkeley, the rest of the
world will surely follow.

A single spoken command to MIT's Oxygen will convene a virtual conference, raising a secure, temporary cone of silence on cue.

That, anyway, is the dream. "You ought to have worldwide storage," says
Culler. "The idea of having your disk and backup and remembering where
your files are - that's baloney. In the future, you've got one great big
ocean: All the data is out there."

"What will it mean to do a database query," he asks, "when the data never
ends?"

1999 was widely hailed as the 30th anniversary of the Internet - or rather
its military grandfather, Arpanet. With more imagination, future historians
might be tempted to push the birthday back further: to the 1950s and the
Defense Department's 1,300-bps Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE),
whose TV typewriter terminals, as baroque as those in Terry Gilliam's film
Brazil, tied radar and missile sites into a Cold War immune system. Or
they might ambitiously trace the beginnings to 1844, when Samuel Morse
dispatched his telegraphic dots and dashes from Baltimore to Washington
to spell "What hath God wrought?"

But creatures gazing on earthly affairs from a God's-eye perspective -
millennia and maybe light-years away - might see the dawn of networked
computing breaking even sooner. For it was some 3.5 billion years ago,
in the ooze of the primal sea, that the first webs of molecules intertwined
to form the chemical circuitry of life. Unicellular creatures appeared:
enclosed molecular networks
that merged into bigger networks called organisms, which collaborated to
form ecosystems and societies of primates that now call themselves humans.
These networks of networks then learned to build artificial networks of
their own, moving first stuff - water, sewage, electricity - and then
information.

As the Internet of today is absorbed by some barely imaginable Omninet
of tomorrow, scientists at places like Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon,
and other technological powerhouses have come to believe that a better-wired
world will require a communications web as intricate, powerful, and malleable
as its living ancestors. While biological networks are fine-tuned by the
algorithm par excellence called Darwinian evolution - genetic variation
and natural selection - the clunky, human-made networks of today are built
top-down in the creationist mode, engineered not by omnipotent gods but
by mere mortals. If the next few decades unfold as the more visionary computer
scientists expect, the line between the natural and the artificial will
blur, then fade away.

Experimenters at Bell Labs have already put more information - 1.6 terabits
per second - through a single fiber-optic line than flows through the entire
US telephone network at its busiest time. And ever more powerful computers
are being pursued on many fronts - not just massively parallel versions
of the electronic computers we have today, but biocomputers that adopt
the fluid computational strategies of nature, and quantum computers that
exploit the subtleties of subatomic physics. Mix in
a few other exotic technologies still in their infancy, and Endeavour's
information ecology suddenly seems a little less flaky.

"Your environment will become alive with technology,"says Leonard Kleinrock,
the UCLA computer scientist responsible for setting up the first Arpanet
node three decades ago. "The walls will contain logic, processors, memory
cameras, microphones, communicators, actuators, sensors."

Your wristwatch, he says, will communicate with devices in your belt -
a "bodynet" - which will talk to your desktop.

"As I move around in my environment, it knows where I am," he continues.
"The room knows I
am there. I walk up to a device and suddenly it becomes mine - with my
applications, my profile, instantly available. Tech will be everywhere
- always there, always on, just the way electricity is there for you."
Hoping to get in on the revolution, Kleinrock has helped to start Nomadix,
a mobile-computing company that promises to equip "information nomads"
with high-speed Net access anywhere, anytime.

Some scientists even see a point, perhaps before the 21st century is half
over, when our inventions - including the Omninet and its components -
are no longer constrained by the limits of human intellect. The same kind
of evolutionary forces that bred the complexity of the biological world
would be unleashed into the electronic realm.